The Role Of The Military

[shakeel shaikh]

The role of the military




By Ayesha Siddiqa


GENERAL Tariq Majeed, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee, recently said that the military was prepared to defend the country and a role was being developed for it on more professional lines to enable it to meet the multiple challenges of security. This statement indicates that the new military leadership is ready to redraw the image of the armed forces.

It suggests that an attempt may be made to portray the military as an increasingly professional force rather than an organisation involved in politics.

However, this statement raises a number of questions about the future role of the defence forces. Considering the new challenges to national security the important question is, what role will the organisation play? More important, is it ready to play a limited role in governance?

There are two important developments which will determine the future role of the military. First, since the country is reviewing its relations with India at a strategic level, the level of external threat is bound to be reduced. It is hoped that the Kashmir issue, despite the failure of India and Pakistan to resolve it, will not remain central to the military-security discourse.

In the past couple of years there has been considerable movement on nuclear-deterrence-related confidence-building measures. The focus is on reducing the level of tension so that it does not spin out of control as it has done in the past. Negotiations are also being conducted on resolving secondary issues such as Siachen and the maritime boundary.

Even if the two countries do not resolve the main issue of Kashmir, the negotiators will be able to bring down the level of tension to a more manageable level. Clearly, the world and the region does not benefit from the India-Pakistan confrontation. The external mediators such as the US hope to negotiate a lower level of tension between the two neighbours.

The strategic rethinking in terms of relations with India needs to be integrated into the defence forces. The change at the top or at the strategic level has not permeated down to the operational and tactical levels. The bulk of the military and its intelligence agencies are still geared towards the external threat and perceive India as the most important, in fact the only, enemy. Anyone not favoured by the military is still touted as an Indian agent.

Surely, it will take some time before the new thinking permeates the other levels of the organisation. However, until that happens the military as an institution might suffer from a certain schizophrenia. Alleviating the problem will mean that the top command must clearly enunciate the role of the military and explain the new challenges to the organisation and the nation.

Second, the military is now confronted with the internal security problem posed by militants in Waziristan, Swat and Balochistan. Militancy is the greatest problem which the country faces and this has been reiterated on several occasions by Pervez Musharraf while he was the army chief and now that he is only a president.

Organisationally, the bigger challenge is to shift the focus of the armed forces from the external to the internal threat. This is a military which was trained to fight conventional medium-intensity conflicts against an external enemy.

One way of dealing with the problem, which the military has adopted at the moment, is to link the internal threat to the external threat. For the army, everything that is wrong with Pakistan today is due to India. The conflicts in Swat, Waziristan and Balochistan are attributed to India’s intelligence agency, RAW, which is said to be funding and supporting the militants.

The problem with this approach is that it will keep the men hanging painfully in the middle and probably more confused than before. Supporting insurgency operations in each other’s territory is an old technique used by India and Pakistan. One hopes that India realises that destabilising Pakistan will not be of strategic interest to the region and India in particular.

What is also necessary to understand is that if India were supporting all insurgents, the Pakistan military would have bled more than it has. The attacks conducted by the Balochistan Liberation Army do not indicate that they are getting a lot of qualitative support from external forces. With more help they would have managed more than what they are doing at the moment.

Since the bulk of the forces are geared towards internal security, the military’s role will have to be restructured accordingly. In the past few years, especially after 9/11, the Pakistan military seems to have concentrated more on its northern borders. Recently, after the crisis in Swat, some units were diverted from Kashmir to the northern areas which is in indicator of how the threat is shaping up.

The top management might consider giving the internal security role to the police and the paramilitary which can play the part better than the armed forces. And then there could be a ‘leaner’ but ‘meaner’ force to deal with the potential external threat. Mixing the two threats is bound to be problematic and taxing for the personnel.

If the top management wants the army to cater to internal security, this would amount to increasing the service’s presence in governance and politics. Dealing with internal security is not a simple role. The army would have to interact with internal management structures at the district, divisional and local government levels to tackle threats to internal security.

One of the examples of role expansion due to internal security pertains to India, where the army was given increased powers to deal with insurgency. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act gives the army an extensive and coercive role in governance.

While the Indian Army generally argues that it does not want to interfere in internal security, counter-insurgency operations are the only role which saves the largest service from downsizing.

A continued counter-insurgency role, however, means that the local population will be exposed to greater coercion. The army’s use in internal security presents a very brutal face of the state.

The question which General Tariq Majeed and his colleagues need to ask themselves is whether it would be fruitful to involve the military in internal security operations, especially in a country like Pakistan where people have a different memory of the armed forces. Here, the military is known for its political involvement, and now it has penetrated even further into society and the economy.

The best option would be to rethink the entire security paradigm with the objective of finding the right organisational mix for fighting internal and external security problems.

The emphasis must be on selecting options which would be popular with the people and would be owned by them more readily. The state must think beyond simple bureaucratic options to solving its overall security problems.

The writer is an independent analyst and author of the book ‘Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy’.
ayesha.ibd@gmail.com